Monday, November 21, 2005

Another organization to keep your eyes on. Worth recalling, also, the Hill & Knowlton orchestrated psyops about "babies ripped out of incubators" in Kuwait that facilitated a vote on the first Iraq war in Congress (and TRG was involved in that, as well, despite the denials on their site). The Rendon Group is just the latest example of a corporate PR entity paid by the U.S. to stoke the flames of war.

From Think Progress:

From “Saddam Hussein’s Development of Weapons of Mass Destruction” [White House website]:

In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, said he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. … Mr. Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs.

None of al-Haideri’s claims were true. Today’s Rolling Stone reveals that the administration’s use of al-Haideri’s lies to justify the Iraq war were “the product of a clandestine operation…that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling a war.”

At the center of this operation was John Rendon and The Rendon Group, “a controversial, secretive firm that has been criticized as ineffective and too expensive,” paid more than $56 million by the government since the 9/11 attacks. (Taxpayers are paying Rendon himself $311.26/hour.)

The Rendon Group personally set up the Iraqi National Congress and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as leader, whose main goal — “pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein” — Rendon helped facilitate. Pentagon documents show that Rendon has the highest level of government clearance (above Top Secret), which helped it with its INC work — “a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein…into the greatest threat to world peace.”

While the White House continues to insist it did not manipulate intelligence before the Iraq war, it sure seems that it hired John Rendon and his group to do just that.